Has anyone experienced this stupid problem? I’ve been sleeping a couple of weeks in the spare room on cheap cotton sheets that develop biggish bits of grayish lint on them. I wash them, put them back on, sleep there, and within a couple of days, again, gray lint balls. These aren’t the hard little ‘pills’, this is lint bits all over, it can be easily removed with a lint brush. I can’t figure out what it is or where it comes from. There’s a nylon backed bedspread on top. Could it be cat fur? Cat doesn’t sleep on the bed or sit on my lap, but there is cat fur all over the house. … This is no huge deal, just annoying. Maybe I should buy better bed sheets?
Does it happen most in areas that are subject to friction from you moving around in bed? If so I assume the fibers are pilling, I assume due to the lower quality cotton in the fabric.
Sounds like pilling to me. Another option is static attracting miscellaneous junk. Do your sheets crackle when they come out of the dryer?
Can you tell what the lint balls consist of? In my experience, it’s pretty easy to tell if they are hairs, cotton or polyester fibers, or something else. (Strangely, fur from my cat appears as white lint, even though he’s quite orange/yellow.)
I was greatly mystified one time when I had a similar issue. The source turned out to be a tissue that I had washed with the sheets. No matter how much I tried to locate all the resulting lint and fuzz balls, they kept turning up for several weeks.
This.
Rule of thumb: The cheaper/thinner the fabric, the more apt it’ll pill when friction is applied.
I will assume now that it’s the cheap sheets. They were labelled ‘cotton’, but they’re very thin and cheap, ‘slick’ and staticky. From Pakistan or some such place.
Thank you for the answers, I wasn’t expecting to get any. No one ever seems to know what I talk about when I try to describe the mystery of the lint-generating sheets…